Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare, by James Shapiro

Reviewing this 2010 book this year is fitting because, as Ron Ward reminded me, 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. This fascinating book by an eminent Shakespeare scholar-Shapiro holds an endowed chair of literature at Columbia University-address the often vexed question of whether that fellow from Stratford was really the author of the plays and poems attributed to him. As Shapiro reminds us, the argument against Shakespeare usually goes something like this: the plays and poems are so sublimely beautiful and powerful, filled with such wisdom and detailed knowledge that it is impossible, unthinkable that the unlettered bumpkin from an obscure village could have written them. It must have been some educated, even noble man of affairs.

The list of proposed real authors is extensive and growing. The leading candidates have been Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere. Shapiro confesses that he believes the man from Stratford to be the real author, but in this absorbing book he does not try to persuade non-believers. To do that, he writes, would be like convincing people who believe otherwise that evolution is real or that the world climate really is warming. That is, the positions are matters of faith, and he will not engage.

Instead he lays out for us the narrative of the dispute and places that narrative in the context of the intellectual and social developments of the times. Recognizing the impossibility of discussing every proposed alternative, Shapiro takes up the cases of Bacon and de Vere, devoting one long section of the book to each. Each had a primary champion. Delia Bacon (not a relative) was Bacon's. In her time she was an accomplished lecturer and author and in general made the argument I sketched out above, She also claimed to have discovered, in the First Folio of Shakespeare, a coded claim by Bacon. She never revealed what the code was. Unfortunately, her theory became an obsession, a monomania. She spent the last period of an unhappy life in a mental institution. Others took up the cause, finding coded confirmation in the text of Shakespeare's works. Shapiro notes that these claims followed hard upon the heels of the development of the telegraph and the Morse code.

Enthusiasm for Bacon waned with the nineteenth century. The anti-Stratfordians replaced him with Edward de Vere. The leader of the Oxfordians was Thomas Looney (rhymes with "bony"), who, nostalgic for an idealized non-democratic past, found his values in the plays and championed the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. His book impressed Freud, who had long doubted the man from Stratford.

The last section of Shapiro's book cites all contemporary mentions of Shakespeare. There are a multitude. The most impressive are those of Ben Jonson, fellow playwright and actor, classically educated. They acted in each other's plays. If the fellow from Stratford could fool Jonson, he could write the plays.

Edward de Vere died in 1604. Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest works from 1605 to 1612.